I'm an engineering student taking part in a research group at my college and we'd like to hear from engineers regarding BOMs. If you've ever made one we'd like to do a quick phone interview. You can email us at <SNIP>. Thank you for your time!

A bill of materials is merely a parts list, hopefully with the size of the parts, part numbers, and where to get the parts. This doesn't seem like college level research material, or has the educational system gotten that bad since I was there that it is now considered College level research to write a grocery list?

Research projects can take different forms. Perhaps the assignment is to determine what designers consider when developing BOMs, specifically are they designing for manufacturing. Perhaps the research is to determine the interplay between designers and supply chain personnel. Perhaps the assignment is to determine the methods of quantifying the tradeoffs that are necessary in performance versus costs in component selection. There are lots more similar subjects for research from which engineering students could benefit.

Depending on the goal of this "research project", it may well be a reasonable assignment. It could well be that the goal has nothing to do with BOMs at all and that they are simply a vehicle for the group to learn how to approach planning and executing a research project such as how to gather, analyze, interpret, and present the data.

Of course, if that is the case then a cardinal rule has already been violated. Self-selective surveys are junk. But, increasingly, people that should definitely know better are teaching people that have no reason not to know any better that quantity has a quality all its own. That if you can generate a hundred times the data by advertising your survey on twitter that you will have more accurate results than if you approach and survey a much smaller randomly chosen sample of the target population.